Hey, you're the one who said you didn't read it and then declared him "one of the good guys". I'm not even saying he's wrong, either, just that you can't take a position on his argument without, you know, hearing his argument.

I think one thing we all should have learned after this year is that "Unprecented" "Unprecedented" doesn't mean "impossible." I'd be surprised if he actually does run and win, but not half as surprised as I was by Trump's rise to power. His age would definitely be an issue, but I don't think anyone can say at this stage how that would play out.

Interested to hear your thoughts on the Thucydides Trap. One could argue that US trade with mainland China makes an incredibly costly war (in which Taiwan may not survive) that much less likely. Taiwan is, after all, still functionally independent and the US has been committed to keeping it that way. So far the government of mainland China has been happy enough with lip-service, doesn't it make sense to pay that lip service for now?

I don't really know anything about it, just curious to hear your perspective.

This "dark current" is part of the answer, but there's more to it. The detector also creates noise when reading the CCD out ("read noise") that produces a background of electrons that act as "false positive" photons. For high quality cameras at professional observatories, the thermal noise is negligible (CCD is cooled with liquid nitrogen) and the read noise is typically on the order of several electrons per pixel. (Some professional observatories DO require dark current corrections, but many don't.)

When you're looking at the types of objects you need these cameras to view, another big noise source is the sky itself. The sky glows at different brightnesses in different bandpasses, and it varies with the phase of the moon, but ~20th magnitude per square arcsecond is a reasonable average. If you're looking at a naked-eye star (<6th magnitude) that doesn't matter at all (2.5 magnitudes is a factor of 10 in brightness, lower values are brighter, blame the Greeks). But if you're looking at a star that's close to 20th magnitude or fainter, the sky is actually the dominant source of noise. How many photons from the source you need for a secure detection is then highly dependent on the sky brightness. Because you add photons from the sky with longer exposures, and Poisson noise from that goes as sqrt(N_photons)~sqrt(exposure time), the signal to noise you build up for a faint star or galaxy can be far worse than you'd expect from just accounting for detector characteristics and Poissonian statistics from your source.

At the other extreme is something like the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has such a low background that even 3 photons in a half-hour exposure is highly significant. In fact, I did my dissertation on optical follow-up to an X-ray survey with Chandra, and about half of our X-ray catalog only had 3 photons. Odds are very high that none of them are spurious. If we had extended the catalog to 2 photons, a handful would not have been real sources (but most would have been).

TL;DR It STRONGLY depends on what your background is like, and that can vary with wavelength and detector.

Profs at tier 1 universities lead research teams. Smaller schools have higher teaching loads, less time for research, but they still usually are able to do some research. They get paid less than contemporaries doing research in industry instead of academia, though, yes, by quite a lot. The trade-off for that is academic freedom to pursue your own line of inquiry.

Playing a variant for a one-off in 3.5 (an edition in which you have to roll to confirm critical hits) where if the critical threat is a natural 20, and the roll to confirm is ALSO a natural 20, it's an insta-kill. Makes every combat very risky, even a starving orphan could potentially get lucky.

Our fighter was a rules lawyer at the best of times, and a munchkin at the worst of times. He had gone full munchkin for this game, using all the supplement books he could lay hands on to get a dwarf fighter with an AC of 30 at level 2. He was a tank. At the other extreme, one party member thought it would be hilarious to play a blind rogue with a halberd, which went exactly as well as you'd guess.

Party is investigating an abandoned druid temple. Well, there's an owlbear inside, roll initiative! Blind rogue wins. Promptly hits the wizard with his halberd. Wizard is down, but not out. This was out first encounter, so it's simple enough for the cleric (me) to bring them back up. Owlbear's turn: natural 20 on the fighter. Roll to confirm: natural 20. Owlbear reaches over and snaps the fighter's neck. The very first attack against this minmaxed dwarf fighter straight up murders him.

On my turn, I bring the wizard back up, but they are prone. They stand, provoking an AoO from the owlbear, and they are down again. There were a few other party members, but from there it was all downhill. Rogue swings and misses, but manages not to kill anyone in the party. We made it another 2-3 rounds before everyone was dead.

This was back in the days of vanilla WoW. I logged in that night and went to the Hinterlands, and just spent an hour or so murdering owlbears for revenge.

If there are answers that aren't clear at /r/askscience, please ask follow-ups! The goal is to communicate with people who aren't scientists, and I think a lot of panelists need to be reminded to cut the jargon. I've noticed that some fields are more sensitive to that than others. (I'm not saying panelists should break it down to ELI5, but should write assuming that the audience doesn't have an undergraduate degree in the topic.)

Since no one has mentioned it yet, "Will Save World For Gold" is a 4e based comic where they explicitly reference rules like oots. The art is all pixel based (maybe a reference to 4e feeling more video-gamey?) . Updates every weekday too.

Light certainly travels on geodesics ("straight lines" for curved space), yes. Whether you consider that light "bent" or "deflected" or not rather depends on your reference frame. The photon doesn't "feel" any acceleration, but to observers on Earth, the path the light takes appears bent, with measurable angles, so we say "bent".